AUGUSTA, Ga. — For decades, the black caddies at Augusta National Golf Club — required by the club’s rules and treasured for their nuanced knowledge of the course’s topography — stood as a striking symbol of the sport’s segregated state.

“As long as I’m alive,” said Clifford Roberts, one of the club’s founders in 1933 and a longtime Masters chairman, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.”

In 1997, 20 years after Roberts’s death, Tiger Woods, with a white caddie, won the first of his four Masters championships, shattering the mirror that Roberts’s vision reflected. Woods, who has won 14 majors, changed the face of golf in more ways than one. Not only is the best golfer of this era not white, Woods’s success has helped push the black caddie to the brink of extinction.

At the 76th Masters this week, there will be no club caddies required; only two black caddies started the season with regular jobs on the PGA Tour and one has since been fired. The great black caddies of the past, who carried the bags for Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus and the game’s other greats, are dead or well into the back nine of their lives.

For a variety of reasons, no new generation has taken the bags from them. Caddying, once perceived as a menial job, has become a vocation for the college-educated and failed professionals who are lured by the astronomical purses driven by Woods’s immense popularity. In 1996, the year Woods turned pro, the PGA Tour purses averaged $1.47 million. This year, they average $6.20 million.

“A guy can make six figures a year on a decent bag now, but the players want to have family members, people that are close to them and who they can relate to on their bags,” said Carl Jackson, one of the few remaining black caddies who will work Augusta this week.

The black caddies who remain are on the Nationwide Tour, golf’s version of Class AAA, he added.

“Or they don’t get a job at all,” he said. “They’re a dying breed.”

Their demise can be traced to other things as well — the ubiquity of the motorized golf cart and the subsequent slashing of caddie training programs, as well as this: the job is not as attractive to blacks who have more career opportunities than previous generations. For the older black caddies, the situation is not without its bitter irony: when the prize money was modest, they were the standard; when the money became huge, they became disposable.

At Alotian Club near Little Rock, Ark., Jackson oversees 14 caddies, only one of whom is a minority. Jackson, who earned enough as a caddie and caddie master to put his six children through college, was asked what advice he would give to an African-American youth who expressed an interest in golf.

“It would be my suggestion,” Jackson, 65, said, “to try to be the player.”

Jackson worked his first Masters in 1961, at age 14. This week, he will work his 51st Masters, toting the golf bag of Ben Crenshaw for the 36th time. While Woods, the pre-tournament favorite on the strength of his first official PGA victory since 2009 two weeks ago, pursues Nicklaus and his record 18 major victories, Jackson will be chasing ghosts who answered to names like Stovepipe and Cemetery.

Photo

Carl Jackson will be working his 51st Masters this week, toting Ben Crenshaw’s bag for the 36th time.Credit
Dero Sanford for The New York Times

Richard Lapchick, an internationally recognized expert on diversity in sports, likened the caddie situation on the PGA Tour to what happened in women’s college basketball once it came under the auspices of the N.C.A.A.

“Until the N.C.A.A. took over, all the coaches were women,” Lapchick, the director of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida, said in a telephone interview. “As the jobs became prominent and more lucrative, the men went after them. I have the feeling something pretty analogous to that is happening in golf with caddies.”

The advent of the golf cart made caddies expendable at private courses looking for new revenue paths. Among the clubs that remain golf cart holdouts, including Augusta National, most use contract companies for their caddies, which squeezes out the independent bagman.

Jackson, an Augusta native with eight siblings, began caddying at age 11 to help his mother, a housekeeper, feed the family. It was either pick clubs for golfers or pick cotton, he said.

“In a sense, golf raised me,” said Jackson, who dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

Jack Stephens, an Augusta National member who later served as the club chairman, became a mentor and father figure to Jackson. Stephens, a Little Rock financier who would hire Jackson at Alotian Club in 2003, encouraged Jackson to complete his high school degree and employed him as his personal caddie. At Stephens’s suggestion, Jackson was paired with Crenshaw at the Masters in 1976. Twice, Crenshaw won the green jacket with Jackson at his side: in 1984 — the year after players were permitted to use caddies from outside Augusta National — and in 1995.

For 12 years beginning in 1990, Jackson caddied on the PGA Tour. When a 20-year-old Woods turned pro in August 1996, he hired a white caddie, Mike Cowan, better known as Fluff, who had enjoyed a long partnership with Peter Jacobsen.

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“I believe when Tiger hired Fluff, I was somewhere on Tiger’s mind,” Jackson said. He added, “I think business people get in players’ heads on these kinds of decisions.”

Jackson did not lobby for the job, and unlike other black caddies, he does not view Woods’s hiring of white bagmen as a betrayal. Since he turned pro, Woods has employed three caddies, none of whom has been a minority.

“It’s not humanly possible for Tiger to please as many people as want his time,” Jackson said, adding, “Tiger is a professional golfer, not an activist.”

Woods used a black caddie, Tommy Bennett, at the Masters in 1995 when he was the only amateur to make the 36-hole cut. In his 2010 book, “His Father’s Son,” the author Tom Callahan wrote that Earl Woods would have liked to have seen his son hire a black caddie full time but knew better, explaining, “He’s a suburban kid.”

Last month, Woods, 36, was asked why he believes there are so few minority caddies on the tour. “When I was younger, we had a few African-American players out here,” he said, referring to the likes of Calvin Peete, Jim Thorpe and Lee Elder. “That’s no longer the case. And I think it’s just that we don’t have the same caddie programs and, hence, don’t have the same access.”

J. J. Hylton, 70, was the caddie for Kyle Thompson as he made the ascent from the Nationwide Tour to the PGA Tour.

“Even though Tiger has things going on to help minorities and stuff, all of them want to slam dunk and play football,” he said.

Thompson let Hylton go last month after missing the cut in his first six events. That left Tony Terry, who is working for Duffy Waldorf, as the only black caddie on the tour.

Hylton, who has no plans to retire, intended to spend this week in the Southern California desert, looking for work at the Nationwide stop there.

“I’m just going to keep doing it until one day I just walk down the golf course, drop dead in the middle of the fairway and hope I don’t fall on my player’s ball and cost him two strokes,” he said. Hylton said he had “zero chance” of working again on the PGA Tour.

“When I came out in the 1980s, I would say the caddie breakdown was maybe 70 percent black, 30 percent white,” he said. “Now it’s like 99.9 percent white to .1 percent black. There’s so much money on the regular tour now. It’s become a buddy system out there.”

There are so few black caddies that Michael Troublefield, a caddie who works on the L.P.G.A. tour, was able to tick off their names. He came up with seven.

One of them is Bennett, 62, Woods’s one-time caddie, who worked for Webb Simpson when Simpson was climbing the professional ranks. “We had fun together and got along great,” said Simpson, the 10th-ranked player in the world who will make his Masters debut this week. “I took him to Q-school in the fall of 2008 and we got through. And basically talked with my manager, and we both thought it was a good idea to kind of keep things going. We were playing well.”

Simpson let Bennett go anyway and hired his friend William Kane. After Kane decided to pursue a youth ministry, Simpson went with the veteran Paul Tesori, who has been on his bag since the start of 2011.

“I started to notice that I might want someone who is a little younger on a weekly basis,” he said. “So that was kind of where we split our ways.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Treasure of Golf’s Sad Past, Black Caddies Vanish in Era of Riches. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe